Me, I rather like dystopias as shown in sci-fi books. Heinlein, etc. The whole class of "mindless anti-science attitudes preventing progress" societies, really. Was a common thing, with a healthy dose of optimism in the dreamers prevailing.

Oryx & Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy) far and away. They're way more realistic now than 1984 or Brave New World. Books that deal with massive extinction and climate change are way scarier than totalitarian governments.

MaddAddam made me feel like vomiting a couple times.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

A Canticle for Leibowitz. Best writing of any of the books mentioned in this thread, although The Handmaid's Tale surpasses it in some other aspects, and is my winner if post-nuclear worlds are not considered sufficiently distopian for lack of a ridiculously evil authoritarian government.

Fahrenheit 451. Best is the minorities speech. Minorities, Montag. Dog lovers, cat lovers, 3rd generation Chinese-Americans. Someone is bound to be offended no matter what you wrote. If you listen to every whiny little group ebtually your books will become bland nothings that don't even have a plot.

Wait, wouldn't Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court count? The whole thing is a medieval hell without any soap, the guy comes in and through modernization, makes himself dictator. Then everyone tries to stop him and thousands upon thousand of people are killed, and everything goes back to the way things were, with even less hygiene.